From the Valley to the Beach to Downtown LA, a wide range of entertaining art exhibitions opened this past weekend. At the Museum of the San Fernando Valley, artist Jodi Bonassi launched her retrospective, "PUBLIC SETTINGS… Private Conversations." Showing a collection...
Alison Petty Ragguette
Alison Petty Ragguette's sculptures voluptuously incarnate equivocal tensions between nature and artifice. Evincing Ragguette's versatility in ceramics and sculpture, "Visceral Bandwidths" at Launch LA debuts her new "Melanin" series alongside examples from recent...
Laguna Art Museum: : Tony DeLap
The sweep and scope of the Laguna Art Museum’s extensive Tony DeLap retrospective encompass several remarkable elements, including the artist’s large hybrid constructions, which feature unusual juxtapositions of shapes and materials, and his curved standing and...
Roberto Gil de Montes and Ann Chamberlin
Two painting shows at Lora Schlesinger Gallery register as pensive pictorial journals of events both experienced and imagined. Including still lifes, figures, landscapes, and combinations thereof, the easel-sized scenes in Roberto Gil de Montes' show titled "Moments"...
Doyle Arts Pavilion: : Jim DeFrance
The Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion has organized a long-overdue posthumous retrospective for Los Angeles artist Jim DeFrance. Grouped largely by artistic series, the exhibition encompasses nearly six decades of his career. Seen altogether, this surprisingly...
This and That – and Taylor Mac
It’s been a tumultuous week in Los Angeles; and for a change, we can’t blame it entirely on the Putin-wannabe currently installed in The White House or his cronies and GOP enablers – notwithstanding the fact that he happened to blow into town this same week to pick a...
“The Subject of Pain is the Business I am In”
The legendarily expressive artist Louise Bourgeois said that the goal of her practice was "to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” This meaning and shaping are potent at The Museum of Modern Art’s Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait, a...
Viva la Vulva
Coinciding on International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, the opening for "Viva La Vulva" had a seamless approach to welcoming dialogue on the topic of empowering sexual health. Founded by Dr. Cara Quant, Panika Kodali, Jeremy Quant and curated by REN Gallery...
Mondongo
Buenos Aires artist collective Mondongo is a collaborative duo consisting of Juliana Lafitte and Manuel Mendanha. Their work doesn't disappoint curiosity engendered by their mysterious name taken from a stew. Following the rickety elevator ride to the age-old Bendix...
Sprüth Magers Los Angeles & University Art Museum, CSU Long Beach: : Robert Irwin
Light and Space Art, one of the few significant movements to originate in Southern California, conflates the forms of Minimalism with the use of light as the actual medium of the artwork. Yet, even with all of the recent interest in the legacy of So Cal art, we have...
Something Resembling Meaning: Revisiting Jasper Johns
It was interesting to walk through the Jasper Johns exhibition, Something Resembling Truth, only a couple of days after my first look at Mark Bradford’s new paintings at Hauser & Wirth. Bradford’s paintings marked something of a departure for him – continuing to...
Liminal Spaces are Mind-Blowing Places
Liminal: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. "Liminal Spaces" at Jason Vass gallery, which opened Saturday night, occupies a position of cool, whether the boundary is mixed-media wall art, free-standing sculpture, or something in...
Martin Soto Climent
Martin Soto Climent's exhibition at Michael Benevento is a meticulously orchestrated visual symphony of photos, videos and sculptures. The Mexico City based artist titled his show "Temazcal" after the type of ceremonial sudatorium that inspired this body of work. The...
EDITOR’S LETTER
Dear Reader, I’m an artist, who has quit making art. It’s been over a decade since I last shot a video or painted. Yes, I miss the hell out of it, but I’d rather give it up if I can’t give it my all. That was the decision I made when I started this magazine 11 years...
The Educated Outsider: John Tottenham
“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game...
Seeing Reality: Abel Alejandre and Others
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands....
Sitting for Don Bachardy
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with...
The Wild Ride of Eli Langer
If one were to Google Canadian artist Eli Langer, most of the results would reference a convoluted legal case against his first show (held at Toronto’s Mercer Union Gallery in 1993) that proclaimed the subject matter not simply to be pornography but child...